Inherent vs. Cultural Factors in Psychoanalysis*

Between social science and psychoanalysis there seems to exist either a misunderstanding or an actual disagreement. Entertaining the hope that it is the latter, I am presenting this paper in a more or less interrogative form in order that the ensuing discussion may clear up some points of apparent difference between the two groups. The nucleus of the dissension embraces more than being at odds over the old instinct-environment question which has been concerned chiefly with biology, chemistry and physics rather than with psychology, though many authors on the subject seem to ignore this distinction. The subject matter of this presentation deals more especially with the integrations of the human organism as related to cultural institutions, exclusively human, exclusively psychological in their composition. The doctrine which hypotheticates inherent ideation as advanced by Freud and other psychoanalysts has been challenged by a certain group of social anthropologists, more notably Malinowski, Kroeber and Goldenweiser, as well as by such thinkers as Dewey and Russell.

The first mentioned of the anthropologists has for some time been engaged in a discussion with Ernest Jones over the origin of culture, the latter adhering to the hypothesis set forth by Freud in “Totem and Taboo” which expresses the view that cultural organization in the main has been constructed on the basis of the Edipus complex which constituted the first act of culture. The Edipus, Freud maintains, resulted from a series of parricides in the primordial horde, the sons having tired of the paternal domination and growing jealous of his exclusive possession of the mother they slew him. Jones attempts further to sustain Freud in the additional assumption that the memory of this event survives in the unconscious of men extant to-day. Two of the first institutions to grow out of this event, aver Freud and Jones, were totemism and exogamy, which in turn gave rise to the family unit. The origin of these instit